Real Advice For Founders

Ganesh Balakrishnan’s Guide to Building a Resilient Startup

Today, we have Ganesh Balakrishnan. He is a businessman with experience working with startups, in India. Ganesh Balakrishnan is also known for appearing on Shark Tank India. He talked about his shoe company Flatheads (now acquired by Styched ). He also co-founded Aurm’s secure locker revolution, scaled a network of over 5 lakh merchants as VP at ShopClues and built the mobile payments platform Momoe (which was later acquired by ShopClues).

After mentoring about hundreds of founders, today, he is sharing his advice with the first-time founders, on team building, managing the money you have, dealing with distraction and staying strong.

How did you hire your first team members? Any tips on finding the right people early on?

After raising the first round, how did you decide where to spend the money? What should founders prioritise?

There’s so much advice out there. How do you figure out what really matters & what to ignore?

Is there any one tech tool, platform, or resource that has helped you the most while building your startup?

What’s one underrated thing about building a startup that you wish you had known sooner?

If you could stop first-time founders from making one mistake, what would it be?

How did you deal with burnout or stress while building?

What was that one decision or strategy that gave your startup its first big breakthrough?

Looking back, what personal skill or habit helped you the most in your journey?

What was the toughest growth challenge your company faced, & how did you overcome it?

How did you acquire your first 50 customers? Any growth hack that worked surprisingly well?

If you had to start your company today, what would you do differently?

Blog overview

Ganesh Balakrishnan shares practical lessons from his startup journey, including building Flatheads and Momoe. From hiring the right team and managing funds to finding customers, staying focused and handling challenges, his advice offers useful insights for first-time founders building and growing a startup.